The campaign to free Assange is over. The public argument about him is not

The campaign to free Julian Assange has reached a dramatic final moment that will divide opinion just as much as every other phase in his remarkable life.

In a twist worthy of a thriller, the WikiLeaks founder is likely to emerge from a courtroom on a remote Pacific island to be flown to Australia and welcomed by political leaders who have campaigned for years to gain his freedom.

Wikileaks founder Julian AssangeCredit: SMH/Age

To some, however, he will remain an enemy of the United States, no matter what happens in the Saipan court in the Northern Mariana Islands. To them, the plea deal to secure his release is a capitulation after a long effort to put him in prison for life.

Some may gloss over the disputes about Assange when he is welcomed home, but the deep division helps explain why it has taken so long for Australia to exert maximum pressure to gain his release.

Australian officials were hostile to Assange in the early years of WikiLeaks because everything he did was a challenge to established power. Rather than support authority, he wanted to expose it.

Many in Parliament House, from both major parties, felt more suspicion about him than support for him when Swedish prosecutors sought to arrest him on sexual assault charges in 2010. He denied those charges, which were eventually dropped.

The Australian defence for its own citizen, holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy because he feared extradition to the United States, was slow and half-hearted. This approach continued when he was moved to Belmarsh Prison.

As recently as 2022, shortly before the federal election, then-prime minister Scott Morrison merely said Assange could return home if the charges against him were dropped. “The justice system is making its way and we’re not a party to that,” he said. Australia seemed to wash its hands of its problem child.

Only in the past two years did anything change. Anthony Albanese aired his frustration about the case when he was opposition leader and then, as prime minister, said that “enough was enough” and the matter needed to be resolved. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton also said the case had gone on too long.

Personal diplomacy has made a critical difference. Albanese raised the case several times with Joe Biden after establishing a good relationship with the United States president when they met in Tokyo after the Australian election. When Biden hosted Albanese at a state visit to Washington DC in October, the prime minister raised it again.

It clearly suits Biden to fix this problem well before the November election, minimising any blowback from patriots who wanted Assange to be sentenced to 175 years in prison. Biden is helping Albanese, but also mending a sore in relations with Australia.

When news broke about the Assange plea deal about 9am on Tuesday in Canberra, there was no surprise for Albanese. The only twist was that the news leaked in the US capital a little earlier than expected.

Key figures in the outcome include Foreign Minister Penny Wong, former prime minister Kevin Rudd, who worked the problem hard as ambassador to the US, and former foreign minister Stephen Smith, now the high commissioner to the UK. Smith visited Assange in prison last year and flew with him from London to Saipan on Tuesday.

The support across federal parliament also sent a message to the Biden administration that Australians wanted Assange to be released, especially when the House of Representatives voted by 86 to 42 in favour of a motion in February to bring him home. The motion was moved by crossbencher Andrew Wilkie, Josh Wilson from Labor, Bridget Archer from the Liberals and David Shoebridge from the Greens.

But there was always a limit to this bipartisanship because most Liberals and Nationals could not vote for a motion that recognised Assange as a journalist and asserted that the most famous WikiLeaks disclosure, the “Collateral Murder” video, revealed evidence of misconduct by the US in Iraq. This was the stumbling block for Dutton and his colleagues in the February vote.

That division remains. There will be a lasting controversy, for instance, over whether Assange put lives in danger by releasing diplomatic cables that revealed US contacts around the world. Others will dismiss him for the way his disclosures – which he denied gaining from Russian hackers – damaged Hillary Clinton in her presidential campaign against Donald Trump.

Many cannot accept that Assange revealed ugly facts in the public interest. History shows, however, that this is precisely what he did. The Collateral Murder video exposed the deaths of civilians in Baghdad at the hands of US forces. Assange did not reveal this as a whistleblower or insider, but as the publisher of a video the US government wanted to keep secret.

The public argument about Assange will not end with his arrival in Canberra. The key decision for Albanese and the parliament was simply that the legal case had gone on too long. Enough was enough – he had to come home.

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